Buckdog was recently threatened with a libel/slander lawsuit for linking to a YouTube video. In it, Elizabeth May appears to say she thinks Canadians are stupid for not confronting the issue of taxation for the purpose of internalizing environmental costs. Yes. Appears to say. Buckdog didn’t even produce the video – Steven Taylor has taken the credit for it. True, the audio file is cut off early, thereby disallowing the listener to follow the train of thought in context.
Here’s more context for you:
Is it I or they? Everything hangs on that pronoun.
Regardless, Elizabeth May is paying the price for flapping her gums too fast. I agree with some of the posters at Rabble.ca: she’d make a better television pundit (where fast, loud and cacaphonous talking is a virtue) than she would a politician. As a politician, this type of mis-communication simply loses votes.
At worst, Elizabeth May ought to be faulted for scattered sentence construction, where thought-trains are interrupred with too many asides. I think she meant the following:
1. All the other politicians are scared to death of a carbon tax.
2. They think Canadians are stupid and cannot . . . (understand carbon taxes?)
a. I agree with that assessment (reference to the questioner’s assessment that everyone is in agreement on the internalization of environmental costs).
b. Most politicians think that if you put on a carbon tax and reduce your income tax, they don’t think they can sell it.
3. They don’t think they can’t sell it because they believe Canadians are stupid (in that they can’t see the connection or tradeoff between lower income taxes and higher consumption taxes.
4. Politicians would rather avoid the subject
That thought train has so many loose connections, it was a wreck waiting to happen.
Elizabeth May’s fiasco only serves to illustrate Frank Luntz’s point in his latest book: it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what people hear. I’d go a step further and say that it’s not what you mean that matters, it’s how people interpret it.
Is it ‘I’ or is it ‘they’? Either way, the outcome depends on what people hear. May spoke too fast for her own good, but what’s even more damaging is her party’s legal threats against a blogger who merely linked to a video.
It’s time to get the Led out.
